MowlView – Markdown viewer for Total Commander

MowlView shows Markdown, R Markdown, Quarto, Jupyter notebooks and Gemtext the way they are meant to look – with headings, tables, code, images, links, Mermaid flowcharts and right-to-left text – or, with one click, as source code with syntax highlighting. Native and fast: no browser engine, no runtime.

What is MowlView?

MowlView is a Lister plugin for Total Commander. Press F3 on a Markdown file and it opens formatted, with headings, tables, task lists, footnotes, alerts, highlighted code and pictures – or, with one click, as source code. It also reads R Markdown, Quarto, Jupyter notebooks and Gemini Gemtext.

Mermaid flowcharts in code blocks are drawn as pictures, and Arabic, Hebrew and Persian text is shown right to left. The plugin is written in C++ against the plain Win32 API, needs no browser engine or runtime, and is available for 32 and 64 bit in English and German.

Highlights

• 01

  GitHub-style Markdown

  CommonMark with tables, task lists, footnotes and alerts, inline HTML and highlighted code blocks.

• 02

  Flowcharts

  Mermaid flowcharts in code blocks are drawn as pictures – all directions, node shapes and subgraphs.

• 03

  Right-to-left

  Arabic, Hebrew and Persian are detected per paragraph and get their own font.

• 04

  More than .md

  R Markdown, Quarto, Jupyter notebooks and Gemini Gemtext; printing, light and dark design.

How it’s built

MowlView is written in C++ against the plain Win32 API, without frameworks or runtimes: its own Markdown parser with the GitHub extensions, its own layout engine for text and GDI drawing in the Windows 11 style. It is the Total Commander sibling of the Mowl editor.

Frequently asked questions